Chương 143: 07. Departure Anew 3

I declined Victoria's offer to stay for dinner. The reasoning was simple and entirely practical: if Ignicia encountered wine, I had no reliable estimate of whether she would reach intoxication before or after the capital reached structural damage. That was not a gamble worth running even once. Olivia, characteristically, asked nothing further.

She simply began assembling what was needed—travel rations, water, a small collection of useful supplies—moving with the quiet efficiency of someone for whom Fire Dragon Princess departing the capital with my brother was, at most, an unusual but manageable logistical arrangement.

"And for Her Royal Highness?" She was directing the attendants when she turned to ask me.

"If the journey is long, should we prepare provisions for Her Highness as well?" I was in the middle of formulating an answer to the effect of I genuinely have no idea what a dragon eats on the road when Ignicia answered first.

"Unnecessary." She was seated by the window, not looking at either of us.

"When I eat properly, I don't need to eat again for half a year." My hands went still. Olivia was quiet for one measured beat, then nodded as if she'd been told something entirely within expectations.

"Understood." That was all. No exclamation. No follow-up inquiry into what properly entailed. The composure was entirely characteristic of her. Had it been anyone else, that sentence would have provoked either reverence or a quiet grief for the household livestock. Though, thinking about it, there was nothing particularly surprising in it. Her physiology had never operated by human parameters.

Trying to apply ordinary logic to a fire dragon was the sort of exercise that tended to expose the inadequacy of the logic, not the dragon. By the time Olivia had finished directing the preparations, Victoria had finally allowed herself to step back from the version of herself she'd been maintaining since we walked through the door. More precisely: she had finally decided she was allowed to.

From the moment Ignicia and I entered Blackwell residence, Victoria had been holding herself in shape—the composed mistress of the household, the steady elder daughter of the Rosa line, the woman who could dismantle any situation and reassemble it correctly if given thirty seconds and a clear view. But once it was settled that things would proceed as they were, that I would be leaving the capital tonight with a dragon princess—the tension she'd been maintaining finally found somewhere to go.

So she didn't reach for more tea. She reached for wine. It wasn't a loss of composure. It wasn't a change in character. It was more like watching someone who had been holding a door shut against a storm finally step back, once the storm had moved on, and allow herself to simply be a person again—specifically, the person who was my sister, and who had opinions about my life choices. I thought, briefly, that this was a good sign. Then she pressed two bottles of spirits into my arms before I reached the door.

"Take these," she said, with complete equanimity.

"You'll find a use for them." I looked down at the bottles. Then up at her.

"Vicky. Are these for warmth, or are they for accelerating my inevitable demise?" Victoria didn't answer. In the brief moment when Olivia had turned to give final instructions to the attendants, my sister made a gesture at me—one that I will not describe in detail, except to note that it was deeply inappropriate, unmistakably deliberate, and would have been entirely inconsistent with her normal character had she been sober. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere.

Support the author by seeking out the original. I stared at her for two full seconds.... Right. She'd clearly had more than one glass already. Under ordinary circumstances, Victoria expressed her feelings about my poor life choices the way a judge delivers a ruling—with measured language and the weight of finality. The fact that she was now communicating through gestures of this particular variety was, paradoxically, reassuring. It meant she wasn't crushed under the weight of tonight.

She still had enough left in reserve to mock me in her own twisted way. I exhaled, tucked the bottles into my pack, and said:"You'd better hope I don't need them."

"I'm more inclined to hope you don't run out too quickly," Victoria said. That was my sister. Every word calibrated for maximum unpleasantness. Accurate. Consistent. Completely immune to gratitude. When Olivia turned back, her gaze moved between me and Victoria in a brief, unhurried sweep. Whether she had seen anything, I genuinely couldn't say. With her eyes, I wouldn't bet against it. But she said nothing. She simply placed the finished pack in my hands.

"Safe travels, Lord Cedric." Her voice was as unhurried as it had been all morning.

"If anything urgent develops in the capital, I'll make sure you hear it first." I nodded.

"Thank you. For everything." She smiled—that quiet, precise expression that gave very little away. And yet, in the moment after it, I had the strange sense that I was the one about to fly out of the capital on a dragon's back, while the person who would actually keep the ground intact behind me had already, quietly, thought through everything that needed thinking through. By the time we left Blackwell residence, the night had settled fully into itself.

The evening wind moved through the streets in slow, dry gusts, carrying a thin chill that settled against the face like fine ash. By the feel of the air, we were well into the second half of the Month of Silence. The Month of Eternal Night wasn't far off—that stretch of thirty-five to seventy-five days when the sky withheld its light entirely, and even the fires inside the city seemed to burn a little shorter, a little less certain of themselves. The lights of the capital fell away behind us, layer by layer.

We walked until the stone roads gave way to open ground, until the low scrub and the night wind and the distant flicker of a watchtower's flame were the only things left in any direction. Far enough. Far enough that if she changed here, the only thing that would wake was the grass. Ignicia stopped. She looked back at me. The look contained no question. It was closer to a brief, silent check—confirming that I wasn't about to suggest she walk another half-mile for safety's sake. Then she changed.

The fire-traced patterns lit along her scales one inch at a time, spreading upward from the ground like something being recalled from dormancy. Her wings unfolded against the dark in a single, unhurried motion—vast, ember-edged, the kind of sight that doesn't register as beautiful so much as true, the way a thing looks when it's finally the size it was always supposed to be. The air around her inverted. The grass went flat.

I caught my cloak with one hand and turned my face against the surge of heat and grit with the practiced efficiency of a man who has done this before and is deeply tired of the fact. A month ago, I would have found this overwhelming. Now I was simply making sure my hood stayed on. That, I reflected, said something deeply unflattering about the trajectory of my life.

I found my footing on the ridge of her foreleg, worked my way up through the gaps between scale and limb with the ungainly competence of long practice, and settled onto her back.

"Right," I said, getting my grip.

"This time, straight—""Hey. Cedric." She cut me off. And something in the quality of that pause—the particular way she said my name—sent an entirely predictable chill down my spine.

"I want to take a look at the east side."... There it is. I had known. On some level, I had always known it couldn't simply be a clean departure. If Ignicia von Dracunia were the kind of person who followed a plan without modification, she would be someone else entirely. I pressed two fingers to my temple and made one final, dignified attempt.

"Your Highness, I'm not sure that's—""I didn't ask for your opinion." The night wind swallowed whatever I might have said next. I couldn't see her expression from where I sat. But I didn't need to. I had spent enough time in her company to know the exact angle of that particular look—fire in the corners, and beneath it, something that was almost amusement. She completed the sentence.

"I'm informing you." The wings came down. The world lurched upward. The wind hit like a wall, and I had no time for anything except flattening myself against her back and locking my grip on the nearest ridge of scale. The lights of the capital shrank below me, swallowed by the dark in seconds, until there was nothing behind us but the faint glow of a city that didn't know it had just been left.

Ahead, to the east, the darkness was deeper and colder and considerably less predictable, spreading wide like something that had been waiting. I had one thought, clear and unhelpful: Every time this woman says she wants to "take a look" at something, it never ends at looking.